Lent Part 4: The Cross and the Empty Tomb

Welcome back for the final installment of this miniseries. I will be looking for new things to write about and if you have any suggestions please let me know. I have some ideas floating around but we will see what happens with those. Happy Easter. I hope you have been enjoying yourselves and are rested. If you wish to explore how the Christian Easter began, I have another video link for you - Sacred Calendar: Easter. (This is also made by the University of Nottingham). Essentially the details of the video include, the centrality of Easter to the Christian faith; Easter focuses the Gospels onto the risen Christ; Easter originates out of the Jewish Passover; the Christian enters into the new life of Christ through baptism; Easter is the end of the preparation of Lent. With that aside, let's go.

First off, here is a rough layout of some of the key events from Matthew 21, leading up to the crucifixion.

Crucifixion, as you may have heard before, was a Roman punishment which was not administered to Roman citizens. It involved being nailed or tied to a wooden cross. The person on the cross would be left to hang for hours, even days until they died. The legs of the condemned would often be broken so they would be unable to push themselves up. Eventually their weight would stop their breathing and they would die. This method of execution was evidently very gruesome and horrible. Jesus was sentenced to die in this manner. He died at roughly three in the afternoon, then was laid in a tomb on Good Friday. The tomb was discovered to be empty the following Sunday. Jesus then appeared to his followers and gave them a task to spread the Gospel to the world.

We can see from the early rise of Christianity that despite the fear of death and the widespread  persecutions that began as early as 30 years into the beginning of the Jesus movement, the movement exploded. Initially, the Christian's who first spread the Gospel were the disciples. These men had journeyed with Jesus for some years and had come to worship him as the Son of God. It is unsurprising that the Jewish people of the time considered this blaspheme. For the people in Jerusalem and Judea it would have been very difficult to conceive of the Creator God of the world and heavens to limit Himself in the form of a human. That he would not be even a king but a carpenter. However, some of the early Christians pushed heavily on an elevated understanding of Christ. The Philippian Hymn (Phil. 2:5-11)  is perhaps one of the earliest doxologies, that is to say if you read it you will get a feeling for a people wanting to worship Jesus as God. These people knew him. Some, like James, were even related to him.

What is interesting about early Christianity is that the Jesus movement grew rapidly despite, as we see in Acts 4:32-35, the followers giving up their material wealth and generally not forcing anyone to convert. What should have been limiting for the growth actually did not seem to halt growth. The leaders of the movement did not end well. For a short concise summary please visit this link,

https://www.reclaimingthemind.org/content/Parchmentandpen/DeathoftheApostles.pdf

The guy who wrote it is doing some interesting things with coffee shops and studied at Dallas Theological Seminary, where Daniel B. Wallace teaches, of whom I have a Greek textbook (There's your six degrees of separation, although not quite).

Essentially my point is that the main witnesses of Jesus' ministry all told as many others as they could until their preaching led to their deaths. These people were from different walks of life, some fishermen, one a tax collector, another a zealot (basically a rebel against the Roman rule in Judea). They all agreed for the most part on what they saw. They all believed this enough to give up their lives for events they were present at. If that isn't worth consideration, I'm not sure what is.

The Theology Network at Nottingham recently hosted the Revd. Dr Ian Paul, who I remember saying something along the lines of, "I'm not 100% certain, but I'm confident enough to stake my life on the Gospel." (http://www.psephizo.com/ is the link to his blog, I also may be misquoting him slightly and if so I apologize. As far as I am aware that was the general gist.) What I found fascinating about that is since Christianity started, followers have been willing to give up their lives for the sake of the Gospel. Unfortunately people have also sometimes chosen to make others give up their lives when they don't want the Gospel but I hope we can agree that this was a mistake.

Just under two thousand years ago, a man called Jesus walked on the earth. He was crucified, died, laid in a tomb, and then rose again. People who witnessed this testified until they were executed. They knew this would happen. Paul for example was present when Stephen was stoned, then went around after his conversion/calling doing near on the same thing. Have a think, maybe a pray, and I will finish with an open question. In concrete terms, what would it take for you to believe the account given in the Gospel according to Matthew and would these terms be hugely different from what it takes to make you believe in anything else?

Take care, I will be back soon,

Joe

Lent Part 3: Jesus heals

Welcome back. With tomorrow being Palm Sunday and therefore next week being Easter weekend, this miniseries will be wrapping up shortly. Hopefully you are also getting excited for Easter and if you want to know what lies at the heart of Easter then visit next week and we can have a look.


Today I will be taking a look at some of the people Jesus encountered and how he changed their lives. I will go through three instances of healing recorded in Matthew and examine what I think they mean and symbolize.


First things first from Matthew 8.1-4 Jesus encounters a leper. Leprosy in the Bible is probably not what we understand as leprosy today (see The Oxford Bible Commentary, section on Matthew 8.1-4). Actually leprosy was probably several skin diseases grouped together under the blanket term. In Number 12.10 and 2 Kings 5.1 the term leprosy is used for a contagious skin disease. Leviticus 13-14 contains a large number of ordinances for skin diseases. These cover both practical health issues and ceremonial purity issues. Essentially, those with leprosy were ostracized and rejected by society. They lived an existence cut off from their people. In Matthew 8.2, a leper approaches Jesus. He recognizes who Jesus is and asserts that Jesus is able to heal, and the leper will be healed if Jesus wills it. In verse 3, Jesus shatters this lepers' world. He touches him. Now imagine having not being touched by another person for a long time. When Jesus reached out he made a connection. Jesus not only touched him. He near on bear-hugged him. When Jesus touched him, he took hold of the leper, grasping him by the hand. This gesture would have meant so much to the man. This real love for people is also what led Jesus to the cross. The leper was healed (or rather cleansed as the disease was understood as an impurity), and Jesus told him to uphold the law (cf. Lev. 14.2-32).


The second example of healing I will take from Matthew 9.1-8. In this example, a paralyzed man is brought to Jesus. The first thing Jesus does is forgive him of his sins. It is clearly a priority for Jesus that the internal health is more important than the external. Jesus recognizes the real problem that lies at the heart of humanities' existence. In James 5.16 we can see that sometimes sickness has a spiritual element. "Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed." The teachers of the law see this and accuse Jesus of blasphemy. As a response, Jesus claims it is harder to heal a person physically than forgive them of their sins, as a physical healing can be observed. Jesus heals the man and restores his ability to walk.


The final example will be from Matthew 17.14-18. A boy is demon-possessed, which we could interpret today as an epileptic. "He has seizures and suffers terribly." Jesus is concerned with the fact that his disciples have not been able to heal the boy. Jesus deals with the demon and the boy becomes well. Before this instance, the boy has always been the object in the sentence. This is harder to pick up in the English but the whole time the boy has been mentioned, he always is an object. Either he is been thrown into fire and water, or being brought to the disciples and Jesus, or being healed. After Jesus heals him, the boy becomes the subject. It is God's wish that we become subjects and not objects. We are children of God, who have been given stewardship over the earth and when we are subjugated and not seen as creations in the image of God, we have distorted and upset the created order.


Time and time again, Jesus' disciples are told and expected to heal and imitate Christ (Matt. 10.8; 11.5; 17.16; 28.18-20). The call is to restore creation. Jesus didn't come to make people into superhumans but to restore them back to what they should have been. The paralytic wasn't able to run as fast as a cheetah, the boy wasn't suddenly able to walk unharmed in fire, the blind do not have x-ray vision. Jesus unties the bonds of a fallen world. He gives an expectation for what will happen in the end. I will also note that whatever you may think about healing, we can agree it doesn't seem to happen as easily as it happened for those around Jesus. From 2 Corinthians 12.7-10 we can see that St. Paul learned to accept his limitations. Many scholars consider the "thorn" to be a physical ailment when compared with Galatians 4.13-15. Paul seems to have a condition which he has learned to accept. He instead uses it to glorify God. We should be willing to accept that not every illness is healed. We should be hopeful, however, that one day everything will. For now, we can treat people with love, as images of God. People are not to be abused, but loved and treated with dignity because of the fact that they are created by God, made by His hands.


Please do leave a comment if you have any thoughts. I just felt I would share what seems to be a large theme in Matthew and the Gospels in general, which is healing. I have commented in favor of eschatological readings, meaning I consider them to be a sign of things to come at the second coming rather than an everyday expectation. However I am well aware of the potential to be completely wrong. Bless you guys, take care,

Joe


*Unless otherwise stated I have used the NLT Bible translation.